Despite the use of electronic results transmission, the Independent National Electoral Commission has stated that the results of the general elections in 2023 will be manually collated.

Festus Okoye, INEC’s National Commissioner and Chairman of its Information and Voter Education Committee, stressed that, as in previous elections, the commission would transmit results from polling units to its result-viewing portal, IReV, but that the Electoral Act specified how results should be collated.

While results would be “essentially” manually collated, he explained that if there was a dispute about a collated result or the result from any polling unit, the collation or returning officer would use the original of the disputed collated result, accreditation data from the BVAS device, and results transmitted directly from the polling unit to determine the correctness of the result.

His words: “There is a significant difference between result transfer/transmission and result collation,” The commission has complete authority over the mode and procedure of voting in an election under Section 50(2) of the Electoral Act of 2022.

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